This section is intended to provide a background or context to the invention that is recited in the claims. The description herein may include concepts that could be pursued, but are not necessarily ones that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, what is described in this section is not prior art to the description and claims in this application and is not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Conventional agricultural combines include a header leading the combine, having a forward gathering portion and a feederhouse portion which contains elements for processing crop material and/or transferring the crop material from the gathering portion to the body of the combine. In the body of the combine, the grain is separated from the chaff and straw, collected, and thereafter unloaded via an auger. Such combines have a variety of designs.
When pulling into or out of headlands with a machine, there are several activities that need to occur in rapid succession. These activities include, but are not limited to, raising and/or lowering an implement, raising and/or lowering a hitch, extending or retracting marker arms, turn power take-off shaft (PTO) on or off, turning a planter on and/or off, changing ground speed, etc. These activities are both tedious and repetitive, yet these tasks need to be performed frequently, and often before and after each turn. Furthermore, these operations are manual operations which are prone to inaccuracies due to the timing of the operator and the time required to perform each operation.
Although a number of systems exist that permit an operator to initiate the “automatic” playback of functions by pushing a button or actuating a similar mechanism, the operator is still required to determine on his or her own when to hit the button. Often, the operator must make this decision by watching to see when a boundary is crossed or is being approached. However, field boundaries are often difficult to identify due to dust or other factors, making it difficult to know precisely when certain operations should be performed or when a button should be pushed to begin an automated process. In fact, it has been observed that button push timing variation has a standard deviation of almost 200 msec. This amount of variation does not allow for precision work (i.e., in the range of +/−30″) at typical planting speeds (about 4-7 mph) and therefore would result in errors exceeding +/−4 ft at these speeds.